If the Yolk Breaks, Fry Another Egg

You do not always have to live with that which brings unhappiness.

When it comes to breakfast I am a creature of habit. Years ago every morning I fried one “over easy” egg for myself. I liked the yolk medium, not hard. One morning, as I dropped the egg into the frying pan, the shell punctured the yolk, which broke. I frowned, and resigned myself to another unhappy breakfast because I knew that when I turned the egg over the yolk would become hard.

I glared at the offending egg. I tried to console myself by thinking about lunch. Then a thought popped into my head. “This egg costs about twenty cents. I can throw it away and cook another egg exactly the way I like it—‘over easy.’”

So I did.

Often when I find a better way of doing something that I have done for years I ask myself, “Why didn’t I think of that sooner?”

Well, I didn’t, and one purpose of this blog post is to remind both of us that there is usually a better way of doing anything. We just haven’t thought of it yet.

Recently my friend Gloria complained to me about her two-year-old sunroom floor. “The tile is pitting and the floor is ugly. It wasn’t glazed properly in the first place. I really don’t like it, but I guess I have to live with it,” she said. Gloria probably meant for the rest of her life.

“Why not take the nice throw rug you have in your second bedroom, and put that over the tile?” I said. “It would look beautiful there.”

“The egg!” She remembered the story I had told her years before.

“Exactly. The egg. You don’t have to live with a floor you really don’t like.”

Together, we moved the rug to its new home. When the yolk breaks, I Fry Another Egg.

Alan